DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
GRADUATE PROGRAMME IN HISTORY
Historical Research:
Theory, Skill and Method
STUDENT HANDBOOK
2015/2016
Course Director: Sarah Hodges
Seminar Tutor: Sarah Hodges
This handbook is only available online
Contents
Introduction.....................................................................................................................................2
Orientation.......................................................................................................................................2
Aims and Objectives ......................................................................................................................................................2
Learning Outcomes........................................................................................................................................................2
Teaching Arrangements ...............................................................................................................................................3
Assessment Guidelines.................................................................................................................................................3
Assessment Deadlines ..................................................................................................................................................4
Assessment feedback....................................................................................................................................................4
Course Module Reviews...............................................................................................................................................4
TSM and your Dissertation..........................................................................................................................................4
Submission ........................................................................................................................................................................4
Plagiarism ..........................................................................................................................................................................5
Part-time Students.........................................................................................................................................................6
Complementary Modules to follow alongside TSM...........................................................................................6
Theory, Skill and Method............................................................................................................6
Basic Skills..........................................................................................................................................................................6
Basic Skills Programme........................................................................................................................................................ 7
Quantitative Research Skills .......................................................................................................................................7
Assessment............................................................................................................................................................................. 8
QRS Programme.................................................................................................................................................................... 9
Methods and Approaches to History ................................................................................................................... 12
Assessment.......................................................................................................................................................................... 12
Methods & Approaches Programme ........................................................................................................................... 13
1
Introduction
‘Historical Research: Theory, Skill, Method’
(TSM) 2015/20116
This is a compulsory module, designed to help postgraduate students of history acquire the variety of
research skills needed to identify, initiate and complete a substantial piece of research in social, economic
or cultural history. It is designed for all Taught Masters students.
NB MA in History & Film students are not required to follow the Quantitative Research Skills (QRS)
strand of the module, and only follow the first term of the Methods & Approaches programme. Further
details are available from the course director, Dr Jennifer Smyth.
Orientation
Aims and Objectives
Post graduate students need knowledge of a wide range of sources and the means to access and survey
them. They need to understand the theoretical frameworks, many of them drawn from the social and
human sciences, and from literary studies, that inform existing work on their chosen topic. They need to
know how to frame historical questions with which to interrogate primary and secondary sources - and
they need to know how to set about answering those questions. They also face the challenge of presenting
their work in written and in spoken form, in essays and dissertation, and in seminar papers.
Believing that history is at once a highly practical and highly theoretical activity, we have planned TSM
with these needs in mind. It will introduce you to library, archival, and electronic resources here at
Warwick, and in the wider world. It will help you use information technology resources for the purposes
of research and for the presentation of your own work. It pays a good deal of attention to your own writing
of history, particularly the writing of your dissertation, from the very early stages of research design when
you map out an area for investigation, right through to its formal. We believe that an understanding of the
ideas and theories that underlie historical work is alone of the skills the historian must possess, and so a
major objective of the module is to help you understand the conceptual frameworks used by the historians
whose work you study. In this way TSM should keep you up-to-date with the constantly developing field
in which you have chosen to work.
Learning Outcomes
Following TSM should enable you to:
•
•
•
outline a topic for research and make a survey of existing work in the field
draw on key concepts from one or more of the social, human and literary sciences
appreciate the advanced literature in one or more of the following: economic, social, cultural,
religious, political or literary history
• discuss the theoretical underpinnings of this work, and suggest how your own research may
contribute to it
• locate and survey sources (archival, library, database, internet, literary, etc.) relevant to the
2
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
work you are undertaking for essays and dissertation
present your work in the form of a seminar talk to fellow students and staff
understand appropriate numerical, statistical, and computing techniques relevant to any data
collection and analysis you undertake
present your research findings, where appropriate, in tabulated and spreadsheet form
write lively, articulate, fully referenced and annotated proof-read prose
have a wide and informed knowledge of recent developments in historical thinking
contribute to historical knowledge by means of your dissertation
Teaching Arrangements
Theory, Skill, Method is organised around three strands: ‘Basic Skills’, ‘Quantitative Research Skills’
and ‘Methods and Approaches to History’.
‘Basic Skills’ is taught mostly on Mondays from 11.00-12.00pm in various venues. Some of
these sessions are compulsory, others are optional. Details of the sessions (and whether they are
optional or mandatory) can be found on the timetable, which can be accessed here:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/ma_studies/tsm/timetable/ Any changes
to the schedule will be noted on the timetable and you will be notified as soon as possible. These
sessions do not generally entail any pre-reading or preparation.
‘Quantitative Research Skills’ is taught on Mondays by several tutors (and students who recently
completed the module) in the Autumn Term (12-1pm) in R2.41 and in H3.44 during the Spring Term. All
sessions consist of a combination of lecture and discussions. To prepare, you should complete the assigned
reading and any exercises noted in advance of each session.
‘Methods and Approaches to History’ is taught on Monday afternoons. In alternate weeks,
there will be a lecture from 2.00pm to 3.00pm in Library 1, followed by a one-hour seminar led by the
seminar tutor (Sarah Hodges). Students will be allocated to Group 1 (3-4pm in H3.03) or Group 2 (4-5pm
in H3.03) during the first week of term. In the weeks without lectures, there will be seminar discussion to
explore the theme in greater depth. To prepare for these sessions, you should read the assigned texts
and consider the questions posed alongside each week’s readings. Attendance at these seminars is
compulsory.
Assessment Guidelines
TSM is an assessed component of your MA course. Overall you will write 6,000 words for assessment, in
two parts: a ‘Quantitative Research Skills’ essay of 3,000 words, and a ‘Methods and Approaches to History’
essay of 3,000 words. More detailed guidelines about word lengths of assessed work can be found in
section 4.10 of the Taught MA Handbook, and below under the separate headings for Quantitative
Research Skills and Methods and Approaches . Please note that all words in the document you submit
count towards the word limit. This includes the essay title, any footnotes, essay bibliography, as well as
graphs, tables and appendices. Marks are deducted for overlength work (1 mark for every 25 words
overlength, or part thereof). Learning to write to a limit is one of the skills the degree is designed to
encourage you to cultivate.
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Assessment Deadlines
•
•
•
Methods & Approaches to History essay (HI989) (History & Film students ONLY):
Term 2, week 1 (Thursday 14 January 2016)
Quantitative Research Skills Essay (HI943):
Term 2, Week 3 (Thursday 28 January 2016)
Methods and Approaches to History Essay (HI944):
Term 2, Week 10 (Thursday 17 March 2016)
Essays are to be uploaded to Tabula by noon of the day in question. Only in very exceptional
circumstances can extensions be given. You should discuss extensions with the Course Director of your
MA in the first instance; only the MA Director is able to authorise any extensions. For extension
procedures please see
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/ma_studies/esubmission/
Assessment feedback
Detailed comments from two internal markers will be provided via Tabula for each assessment
within 20 days of the dates above. An internally agreed mark will also be confirmed, but please note
that this remains provisional until ratified by the external examiner.
Course Module Reviews
At the end of the autumn term and when TSM finishes in the early summer term, you will be asked
to complete a course module review for each element of TSM. This can be done via feedback forms:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/postgraduate/ma_studies/tsm
Your response to the content and teaching of the various courses you have taken is extremely valuable,
especially in planning for the future. Please note your attendance on the number of seminars relevant
to your programme of study will also be monitored. The TSM Module Convenor makes a report on the
attendance and reviews they have read to the Postgraduate Committee. They report back to students
on the results of the questionnaire, and the Staff-Student Liaison Committee also considers these
reports.
TSM and your Dissertation
You should be considering possible dissertation topics from your very first weeks on the Programme,
and the MA Director will assign you a supervisor by Term 1, Week 5. For details, please see the
‘Dissertation Timeline‘ in the Taught MA Handbook (appendix IV). The timing of the assessments in
TSM is geared to enable you to use both assignments (the ‘Quantitative Research Skills’ essay and the
‘Methods and Approaches to History’ essay) as part of your preparation for your dissertation work.
Submission
Use https://tabula.warwick.ac.uk/coursework/ to access Tabula, the ‘coursework management’
system which will enable you to submit your essays/assignments. When you get to the
4
‘coursework management’ system, you will be presented with a screen which lists all the
essays/assignments that you are due to submit this year under the heading ‘Your assignments’.
The list is annotated to show those essays which are due, those which you have already submitted
and any which are over-due.
Click on individual assignments to view or upload your essays, as appropriate. You will be asked
for a word count. Please enter this as a number (with no commas or spaces), e.g. 4900. Please
note that the internal examiners will check to see that this word count is correct.
After you’ve submitted your work, the system will send an email to your Warwick email
account to confirm your submission.
Plagiarism
When writing essays, always identify your sources for specific information and, where appropriate,
the ideas which you use. It is bad academic practice for a student to fail to do so, just as it would be
for an author writing a book or scholarly article. Copying without acknowledgement from a printed
source is as unacceptable as plagiarising another student’s essay.
It is equally wrong to reproduce and present as your own work a passage from another
person’s writing to which only minor changes have been made, e.g., minor alteration of words or
phrases, omission or rearrangement of occasional sentences or phrases within the passage. This
remains plagiarism even if the source is acknowledged in footnotes because it would appear to the
reader that the basic structure and phrasing is your own, whereas in reality you would be
reproducing someone else’s structure and phrasing.
Unacknowledged quotation, disguised borrowing, or near-copying will be treated as
plagiarism and penalised according to its extent and gravity.
Your attention is drawn to the University’s Regulation B, Essays, Dissertations, Reports and
Other Assessed Work, not Undertaken under Examination Conditions as Laid Down in the University
Regulations for the Invigilation of Examinations (University of Warwick Calendar, Section 2; online at
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/gov/calendar/section2/regulations/cheating/ and to the fact
that, in extreme cases, the penalty for plagiarism is a grade of zero in the whole module. The History
Department may use plagiarism software or other appropriate means to identify plagiarism in students’
assessed and non-assessed work. In the last few years the University disciplinary machinery has
imposed penalties in several cases on students who have been convicted of plagiarism in assessed
work. If you are uncertain about what constitutes plagiarism, please talk it over with your module
tutor, personal tutor, or the Director of Graduate Studies.
Finally, it cannot be repeated enough that all assessed work should conform
to the guidelines as described in the departmental ‘Style Guide for Graduate
Students’:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/postgraduate/ma_studies/style_guide_1213_current.pdf
Writing that lacks clarity, inadequate proof-reading and incoherent footnoting courts low marks.
Dissertations may be referred for resubmission for the same reasons.
5
Part-time Students
Part-time students must follow TSM over the first year of the degree.
Part-time students should note that although every effort has been made to schedule the various elements
of the course in regular time slots, some of the elements of the course are scheduled at variant times. Please
check the timetable well in advance to allow sufficient time for planning ahead.
Part-time students should discuss their pathway through the module with their MA Course
Director and with the MA Director, Sarah Hodges. There should be an agreed account of how the
student is to take the course on file in the Graduate Programme Office (H340) by the beginning of
November 2015. If you have any questions regarding the pacing of your MA, please consult the MA
Director.
Complementary Modules to follow alongside TSM
FROM MANUSCRIPT TO PRINT
Historians with an interest in developing their research and palaeographical skills in Renaissance and
Early Modern Europe are encouraged to participate in a series of classes and workshops organised by
the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. Students may choose to follow the skills programme
throughout the year, or to focus on one particular term. Only occasional attendance, especially in the
case of Term 2, is not advisable. Historians may find of special use the material covered in Term 2, which
emphasizes palaeography and textual editing. To register and/or further information contact the
Renaissance Centre secretary, Jayne Brown, renaissance@warwick.ac.uk (office: H4.48b, near the
Graduate Space).
Further information can also be found on the web page:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/postgradstudy/manuscripttoprint/
Theory, Skill and Method
Please see visit http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/ma_studies/tsm/timetable/
for details on which sessions take place when, which elements are compulsory or optional, and any
further up to date changes.
Basic Skills
The purpose of this strand is twofold: to equip you with a toolkit of useful analytical and methodological
techniques, and to provide training in writing logical, persuasive and elegant history. Some of the
sessions thus concern the designing and structuring of a piece of extended historical writing. Others
provide practical training in using archives, or in employing newspaper sources. As noted above, some
of these sessions are compulsory and some optional. (For details, please see the TSM timetable).
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Basic Skills Programme
Term 1
Term 1
Week 2 Library Introduction (Lynn Wright)
Monday 12 October, 11am-12pm, Library Seminar Room
Week 2 History & Migration: Disciplinary Approaches - Anthropology
Monday 12 October 1pm – 2pm, S0.19 (Social Sciences)
Week 3 Library referencing and EndNote (Francesca Cornick)
Monday 19 October, 11am-12pm, Library Training Room
Week 4 Finding a Supervisor (Sarah Hodges)
Monday 26 October, 11am-12pm, H0.58
Week 4 History & Migration: Disciplinary Approaches – History
Monday 26 October, 1pm-2pm, S0.19 (Social Sciences)
Week 5 Funding a Research Degree, Mark Philp
Monday 2 November, 11am-12pm, H0.58
Week 7 Archival Materials, Martin Sanders
Monday 16 November, 11am-12pm, H0.58
Week 7 History & Migration: Disciplinary Approaches – Political Science
Monday 16 November, 1pm-2pm, S0.19 (Social Sciences)
Week 8 Introduction to the Modern Records Centre [MRC]
Monday 23 November, 11am-12pm, Modern Records Centre
Week 9 History & Migration: What have historians to say about the current crisis?
Monday 30 November, 12pm-1.30pm, S0.11 (Social Sciences)
Quantitative Research Skills
The purpose of this strand of TSM is likewise two-fold: to provide training in basic quantitative skills
and to initiate the process of conducting original research. The strand consists of a series of lectures
and training in both IT and historical skills useful for quantitative analysis.
This strand does not assume any specialist mathematical skills. If you can count then you will be able
to complete this strand without any difficulties. We do, however, expect that you either possess or
acquire basic competence in the use of common word processing and spreadsheet programmes. The
University’s IT Services Training programme provides extensive training in the use of Microsoft Word,
Excel and other packages and you are encouraged to take advantage of these sessions. Finally, the
Department website contains useful information and a self-training programme called ‘Computing for
Historians’, which you can find at:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/res_rec/skills/computing_intro/
If you have any concerns about your quantitative skills, you may like to start here, and please don’t
7
hesitate the MA director, Sarah Hodges, if you have any questions.
In addition to reading the assigned texts and attending all sessions you may wish to consult
one of the following:
J. Elliott, Using Narrative in Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (London,
2005)
Charles Harvey and Jon Press, Databases in Historical Research (Basingstoke, 1996)
Pat Hudson, History by Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches (London, 2000)
John H. Kranzler (ed.), Statistics for the Terrified (3rd edn, 2002)
Sonja Cameron and Sarah Richardson, Using Computers in History (Basingstoke, 2005)
‘Research Tools and Methods’, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/research_tools/
‘Enabling Digital Resources for the Arts and Humanities’, http://www.ahds.ac.uk
Assessment
This strand of TSM is assessed via an essay of 3,000 words, based fundamentally upon the
quantitative analysis of material drawn from appropriate historical sources. The purpose of this
essay is for students to demonstrate skill in the use of quantitative analysis to support their historical
research. The training necessary for undertaking the essay is provided by the bespoke module on
quantitative research skills which includes examples from the research of both staff and students in
the Department. Additional support in the use of IT packages such as Excel is available from IT
services and from the ‘Computing for Historians’ online package.
Research for this essay is likely to involve the creation of some sort of analytical database, but
this is not a requirement. Your database, should you be using one, might consist of an Excel spreadsheet
containing data derived from a primary source such as a census. It might instead constitute a ‘text
database’. (A text database is a ‘collection of related documents assembled into a single searchable
unit’, such as a book.) In past years successful essays have analysed topics ranging from the composition
of the population runaway slaves in the American south to the frequency of biblical references in early
modern English literary works to mortality and health records from the Boer War. The central
requirement for the successful completion of this essay is that you engage intelligently with your source
material and that you demonstrate competence in the manipulation of quantitative data for the
purposes of historical research. The essay does not require sophisticated mathematical skills or the
construction of a vast electronic database.
Choosing a topic constitutes part of the challenge of writing this essay. You might wish to
use the essay to explore themes that you will explore more fully in your dissertation, or you might
instead base the essay on material and/or historiographic questions emerging from one of your
modules. In all cases you should focus fundamentally on the research questions explored in the
essay, on the virtues and defects of your chosen source(s), and on the historiographic and/or
methodological context in which you situate your own research.
Depending on the nature of the research question explored in the project, marking will reflect,
variously, the effort and originality of the collection of data under analysis, the historical and
historiographical significance of the conclusions reached, the complexity and accessibility of the source
material, and the clarity of the exposition. Specifically, you will be expected to demonstrate:
a)
Skill in the use of quantitative analytical methods such as counting, or the construction of
percentages, averages and frequencies to analyse and interpret historical sources.
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b)
c)
i.
ii.
iii.
d)
e)
iv.
v.
vi.
Consciousness of the significance of the conclusions reached for the historical understanding
of the problem under consideration. This might include analysis of the relevance of the project
to an existing historical or historiographical debate.
Sensitivity to the strengths and weakness of the source(s) used for this project. This might
entail discussions of:
the process of transferring information from the source(s) to a database for the purpose of
analysis (this process is often called data modelling),
treatment of your source(s) in other historical works, and
specific issues raised by particular types of data (for example your treatment of foreign or
archaic currencies, or the decisions you have taken in classifying the occupations listed in a
census).
Competence in the creation and manipulation of spreadsheets and/or databases and/or
text databases, including, where appropriate, the use of software packages such as Access
or Excel.
Presentational skills. The essay should contain:
a succinct report on the methodology used to analyse the sources. This methodology might
consist of a relational database or spreadsheet. It might instead comprise a more
unstructured analytical form such as a Word document,
a clear statement of the conclusions reached, and
clear and informative visual presentation of material (where appropriate).
Databases and spreadsheets are not themselves required as part of the essay (although where
appropriate, they might usefully be included as an appendix, and are included in the overall wordcount).
Please note that all essays should have numbered pages and you should consider the most appropriate
method of integrating any graphics into the text of your essay.
Above all, the project should demonstrate the use of quantitative skills in the service of
historical analysis rather than as an end in themselves and it will be assessed on that basis.
QRS Programme
Term 1
Bespoke IT training sessions will take place in the first term. Information about these sessions will
be given in the Week 1 meeting for all new postgraduate students on Monday 5 October at 1pm
in the Graduate Space (4th floor, Humanities). Session times will also be posted on the TSM
timetable: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/ma_studies/tsm/timetable/
Week 2 – Why Quantify: An Introduction to Quantification in Historical Research (Sarah Hodges &
Andrew Burchell)
Monday 12 October, 12-1, R.2.41 (Ramphal Building)
In this session we will discuss the following:
• the assessment procedures for the quantitative research skills section of TSM
• why quantification matters to historians
• source assessment and data-modelling by historians (for some guidelines see Sonja
Cameron and Sarah Richardson, Using Computers in History, pp. 76-87)
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Week 3 – An Introduction to Sampling (Sarah Richardson)
Monday 19 October 12-1, R2.41
All historians sample their data in some way. This session will consider different approaches to
sampling with their strengths and weaknesses.
Reading:
P. Hudson, History By Numbers (2000), ch. 7R. Schofield, ‘Sampling in Historical Research’, in E. A.
Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth Century Society, pp. 146-90.
Week 4 – Simple Statistics for Historians (Sarah Richardson)
Monday 26 October, 12-1, R2.41
This session will cover some basic but essential statistical methods for historians including using
time-series, indices and descriptive statistics. It will also cover the presentation of statistical
material.
Reading:
P. Hudson, History By Numbers (2000), chs. 3-5
M. Botticini, ‘A loveless economy? Intergenerational altruism and the marriage market in a Tuscan
town’, Journal of Economic History, 59 (1999)
Steve Hindle, ‘Power, poor relief, and social relations in Holland Fen, c. 1600-1800’, Historical
Journal, 41 (1998)
Martha Olney, ‘When your word is not enough: race, collateral and household credit’, Journal of
Economic History, 58 (1998)
Robert E. Dowse; John A. Hughes, ‘Girls, Boys and Politics’, The British Journal of Sociology, 22
(1971)
Week 5 – Spatial Analysis for Historians (David Beck)
Monday 2 November, 12-1, R2.41
This session will explore some simple methods by which space can be visualised in historical research,
and discuss why it is important to think about these. It will also include a brief discussion of some
tools you can explore for creating and presenting maps in your work. It would be useful (but not
essential) to bring along you laptops/tablets.
Reading:
David W. Miller, ‘Social History Update: Spatial Analysis and Social History’, Journal of Social History, 24
1990), pp. 213-220
David Lambert, ‘“Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River”: Towards an historical geography of
British geography and Atlantic slavery’, Journal of Historical Geography, 35 (2009), pp. 44-65
R. J. Mayhew, ‘Border Traffic: recent exchanges between historical geography and intellectual history’,
Journal of Historical Geography, 38 (2012), pp. 340-343
Robert Schwartz, Gregory, Ian and Thévenin, Thomas, ‘Spatial history: railways, uneven development,
and population change in France and Great Britain, 1850-1914’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
42 (2011), p. 53-88.
Any
of the projects or case studies on http://www.historicalgis.org/projects.html
http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/index.php.
or
Web Resources (from the simple to the complex):
http://www.historypin.com/
10
http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/
http://rumsey.geogarage.com/
http://republicofletters.stanford.edu
http://www.port.ac.uk/research/gbhgis/
Week 7 – Using Quantitative Data in Research (Sarah Richardson with Lewis Smith)
Monday 16 November, 12-1, R2.41
Some relevant readings may be posted on the website prior to this session. Please check there.
Week 8 – QRS Project Planning (Sarah Hodges and Sarah Richardson)
Monday 23 November, 12-1, R2.41
Term 2
Week 1 – QRS Drop-in Session/Troubleshooting (Sarah Richardson)
Monday 11 January , 12-1, H3.44
These sessions will discuss the assessment. Students are encouraged to bring their projects to the
session.
Week 3 – QRS Drop-in Session/Troubleshooting (Sarah Hodges)
Monday 25 January , 12-1, H3.44
Week 3 - Thursday 21 January 2016– QRS 3,000 word Assessment due
11
Methods and Approaches to History
This strand of TSM underpins the aims of the entire degree, in that it alerts post graduate students
of history to the many theoretical frameworks, often derived from related and contiguous
disciplines that inform historical writing. The lecture/seminar structure is designed to allow you to
explore these concepts and theories in some depth, and to interrogate the writing of historians who
use them. It should also help you to build up an informed knowledge of recent developments in
historical thinking as well as a history of the discipline - a history of History - itself.
Lectures take place fortnightly. Each is followed by two one-hour seminars, to allow the themes
of the preceding lecture to be discussed; all seminars are led by the TSM seminar tutor (Sarah Hodges).
There will also be a fortnightly second round of seminars for each lecture, to allow for further exploration
of the themes. The ‘required readings’ constitute mandatory minimal preparation for the seminar;
these have been selected by the lecture team because they are, variously, good examples of ways in
which historians have approached the ‘theory’ or concept in question, or because of their fundamental
importance to historical theory and practice, or because they introduce seminal approaches and
methodologies. The questions attached to each seminar are for guidance as you read. A set of seminar
readings follows.
If you would like to do some preliminary reading we recommend:
Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History. A Critical Reader in Twentieth-century History
and Theory, Manchester University Press, 1999.
Ludmilla Jordanova, History and Practice, Longman, 2000.
Keith Jenkins (ed.), The Post Modern History Reader, Routledge, 1997.
Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory, Routledge, 2002.
Assessment
This strand of TSM is assessed by means of a 3,000 word essay. The aim of this essay is to explore
the theoretical aspect of historical research, and your essay should, as a minimum requirement,
engage with theory. You may choose to focus on one of the themes of the TSM module, or you may
link one of the theoretical themes (or one of the individual works of theory) to an area of your own
research interest.
You may opt to relate this essay to your proposed dissertation topic, but this essay could also
be related to the content of one of your MA modules, or you may choose to explore theory as theory,
by analysing a set of ideas or approaches (‘gender’, ‘power’, etc.) studied in this strand. You may
either use any of the questions listed in the individual seminars as the basis for an essay title, or you
may devise your own title. In any case, your ‘Methods and Approaches to History’ seminar tutor
should be consulted over the choice of topic and theme. The longer Additional Reading lists will be
useful in preparing the ‘Methods and Approaches’ essay.
12
Methods & Approaches Programme
TERM 1
Week
1
2
Lecturer
Sarah Hodges
Laura Schwartz
Topic
Introduction
Gender
Gender
3
(seminars only)
4
5
6
7
Gurminder Bhambra Race
Race
(seminars only)
Aditya Sarkar
Class
8
(seminars only)
Class
9
10
Claudia Stein
(seminars only)
Power
Power
Required Reading
(no reading required)
McClintock, Imperial Leather
Downs, ‘From women’s history to gender history’
in Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin
Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and
Practice (2010, 2nd ed.)
Trouillot, Silencing the Past
Reading Week
Communist Manifesto (ideally read the 1998 Verso
edition with intro by Eric Hobsbawm)
Sennett, The Hidden Injuries of Class (1973): 1-50
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. An
Introduction ( 1978 [1976])
TERM 2
Week
1
2
3
Lecturer
Howard Chiang
(seminars only)
Ben Smith
Topic
The Body
The Body
Violence
4
(seminars only)
Violence
5
James Baldwin
Law
6
7
8
9
(seminars only)
Giorgio Riello
(seminars only)
Law
Materiality
Materiality
10
Sarah Hodges
End of term
surgery
Required Reading
Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images
Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Riviere, having
slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother:
A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century
Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State:
Textual Domination and History in a Muslim
Society (Berkeley:
University of California Press,
Reading
Week
Miller, Material Culture and Mass
Consumption
No lecture or seminars: drop in meetings in H3.44
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Introduction
Term 1, Week 1
Please note there are no readings for this introduction.
Gender (Laura Schwartz)
Term 1, Weeks 2 and 3
Required Readings: Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), especially chapter 1 AND Laura Lee Downs,
‘From women’s history to gender history’ in Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore
(eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010, 2nd ed.)
Jane Austen, through the words of the female protagonist in Northanger Abbey, passed a celebrated
judgement on history texts:
History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in ... I read it a little as a duty but it
tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings,
with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing and hardly any
women at all - it is very tiresome.
While there is a tradition of women writing history outside the academy, historical writing until quite
recently was a highly gendered exercise. By the 1970s, within the context of the rise of ‘second-wave
feminism’ and its intervention into the ‘new’ social history, there was a call for an exploration of
women’s history that did not just add women to the existing narratives but sought to ask new questions,
and develop new methods to answer them. Gender history as an idea first came to light in the mid 1970s
with individuals such as Joan Kelly and Natalie Zemon Davis advancing new approaches to history. The
most optimistic feminist historians saw gender history as the way to ‘demolish entirely the ghettoisation
of women’s history’ and the way in which to break down the barriers that enshrined the exclusively male
orientation of traditional historical topics. Most historians agree that gender is by definition inclusive.
Nothing is gender neutral. An analysis of the effects of gender history takes all historians away from the
histories of ‘man’ as the universal. And many historians of gender also see nothing as fixed, or essential
in the manifestation of gender; rather each age, each set of historical circumstances, has produced its
own definitions of masculine and feminine. The analytical possibilities seemed endless. Joan Scott in her
important essay ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, gave the first systematic explanation
of this new approach. She described gender as ‘a constitutive element of social relationships based on
perceived differences between the sexes’, the ‘knowledge that establishes meanings for bodily
difference’. It was not only about women and men, but also, she continued, society’s ‘primary way of
signifying relationships of power’.
In this session on gender history we will explore how gender history has evolved and the impact it
has had on the discipline of history. We will reflect on how we might use gender ‘as a category of analysis’
in our own work. What can we learn when we look at a theme or topic in history through the lens of
gender?
Suggested Essay Questions:
1.
How can gender be a ‘category of historical analysis’?
2.
What is the relationship between women’s history and gender history?
3.
Examine McClintock’s book as a gendered history of British imperialism. How does the
language of gender construct and legitimise imperialism?
4.
How do gendered definitions of work or family, or the law, shape our understanding of
women’s and men’s roles in history?
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Further reading:
Judith M. Bennett, ‘Feminism and History’, Gender and History 1.3 (1989): 251-72.
Kathleen Canning, ‘Gender History, Meanings, Methods and Metanarratives’, in K. Canning, Gender
History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class and Citizenship (New York, 2005): 3-62.
Olwn Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, vol. 1, 1500- 1800
(London, 1995).
Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley,
1993).
Joan Scott, ‘Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, in J. Scott, Gender and the Politics of
History (New York, 1988). Originally published in the American Historical Review, 91.5 (1986).
Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker (eds.), Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and
Periodisation (Chichester, 2009), especially the introduction, and chapters 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8.
Race (Gurminder K Bhambra),
Term 1, Weeks 4 & 5
Most histories of the modern world, or ‘modernity’, define it in relation to the processes of
industrialization and democratization that were seen to occur in Western Europe in the long
nineteenth century. These processes, having been initiated in Europe, were then believed to have
spread around the rest of the world. Such narratives are deficient in at least two ways. First, they
fail to address the broader contexts of dispossession, colonization, enslavement, and
appropriation that were the conditions of the ‘European’ revolutions. Second, they rarely
acknowledge other historical events and processes as equally significant in the ‘making of the
modern world’. In this session, we look at the ways in which ‘race’ has structured both the making
of the modern world and the histories of the modern world.
Essential Reading
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 2005. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon
Press
Further Reading
Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2007. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological
Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2011. ‘Historical Sociology, Modernity, and Postcolonial Critique,’
American Historical Review Roundtable: Historians and the Question of ‘Modernity’ 116
(3): 653-662.
Du Bois, WEB 1935. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. Various imprints
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne 2014. An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Beacon Books
Dussel, Enrique D. 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of
Modernity. New York: Continuum
Fanon, Frantz 1968 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press
Stovall, Tyler 2006. ‘Race and the Making of the Nation: Blacks in Modern France’ in Michael A.
Gomez (ed.) Diasporic Africa: A Reader, pp200-218. New York: New York University Press
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 1997. ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early
Modern Eurasia,’ Modern Asian Studies 31 (3): 735-62
Williams, Eric 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. University of North Carolina Press
15
Seminar / Essay Questions:
What do historians study when looking at race? How is race conceptualized and mobilized?
Critically assess the extent to which histories of dispossession, appropriation, colonization and
enslavement are present within narratives of the emergence of the modern world.
What can a study of race tell us about the modern configuration of disciplines such as history,
sociology, and anthropology?
Class (Aditya Sarkar)
Term 1, Weeks 7 and 8
Required reading: The Communist Manifesto (ideally, read the 1998 Verso edition with the
introduction by Eric Hobsbawm) AND Richard Sennett, The Hidden Injuries of Class (Cambridge,
1977): 1-50.
Suggested seminar/essay questions:
1.
Is Marxism obsolete?
2.
Is class still a relevant concept?
3.
‘Class is a useful concept for historians only to the extent that it throws light on relationships
between subjective identity and social structure.’ Discuss.
Further reading:
G. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (1978).
Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Marx and History’ in E. Hobsbawm, On History (1997).
Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Karl Marx’s Contribution to History’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science
(1972).
Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Class Consciousness in History’ in I. Meszaros (ed.), Aspects of History and Class
Consciousness (1971).
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London, 1984).
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in A. H. Halsey et al (eds), Education: Culture, Economy, and
Society (Oxford, 1997): 46-58.
M. Bush (ed.), Social Order and Social Classes in Europe since 1500 (1992).
David Cannadine, Class in Britain (1998), pp.1-23; pp. 164-89.
Fiona Devine, Mike Savage, John Scott and Rosemary Crompton (eds), Rethinking Class: Culture,
Identities and Lifestyles (2004).
Patrick Curry, ‘Towards a Post-Marxist History’ in Adrian Wilson (ed.), Rethinking Social History. English
Society, 1570-1820 (1993).
Geoff Eley and Keith Neild, The Future of Class in History. What’s Left of the Social? (2007).
G. Eley & K. Neild, ‘Farewell to the Working Class’, International Labor and Working-Class History
(2000).
Patrick Joyce (ed.), Class: A Reader (1999).
J. Lawrence, ‘The British Sense of Class’, Journal of Contemporary History 35.2 (2000): 307-318.
Terry Lovell, ‘Bourdieu, Class and Gender: “The Return of the Living Dead”?’, Sociological Review 52:
Supplement 2 (2005): 35-56.
J. Pakulski & M. Waters (eds), The Death of Class (1996).
Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Beynon, ‘Handing on Histories’, Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Benyon (eds),
Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain (London, 2001): 2-24.
Mike Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation (2000).
Mike Savage, ‘Space, Networks and Class Formation’, in Neville Kirk (ed.), Social Class and Marxism:
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Defences and Challenges (1996), Chapter 3.
Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self and Culture (London, 2004).
Power (Claudia Stein)
Term 1, Weeks 9 and 10
Required Reading: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. An Introduction (engl.
1978 [1976]).
Michel Foucault has been hugely influential in shaping an understanding of power that was no
longer centred on actors or underlying structures toward the idea that ‘power is everywhere’,
diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’. The lecture and seminar
investigates his understanding of power in one of his major later works. In The History of Sexuality,
vol. 1, Foucault not only clarifies his understanding of the ‘power/knowledge’ nexus but also
presents his ideas of ‘biopower’, a concept that has gained considerable influence in many
disciplines of the humanities over the very recent past.
Questions:
1. According to Foucault, what is 'modern' about 'modern’ power?
2. What does Foucault understand by the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and how does it relate to
practices of power?
3. According to Foucault, what is the relationship between knowledge and power?
4. How can sex be a form of power?
5. According to Foucault, what makes 'truth' true?
6. One of Foucault's main claims about power is that it is 'productive'. What does this mean?
7. What does Foucault understand by ‘biopower’ and how does it differ from ‘sovereign power’?
Additional Reading:
Michel Foucault, ‘The Birth of Social Medicine’, in Michel Foucault, Power, ed. J.D. Faubion, (2000),
134-156.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977).
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–78 (2007).
Michel Foucault,‘The Right of Death and Power over Life’, in Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow (1984), pp. 258-272.
Michel Foucault, ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth-Century, in Michel Foucault, The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (1984), pp. 273-290.
Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow
(1984), pp. 51-75.
Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Afterword to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, ed. H.L. Dreyfuand, Paul Rabinow (1982) [Also available on JSTOR: Critical Inquiry,
Summer 1982, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1343197].
Davidson, Arnold L., Foucault and His Interlocutors (1997), pp. 107-182.
Gutting, Gary, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005) [A very, very good and affordable
introduction!]
Rabinow, Paul and Rose Nicklas, ‘Thought on the Concept of Biopower’ [see
http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/pdf/rabinowandrose-biopowertoday03.pdf].
Rabinow, Paul, and Rose, Niklas, ‘Biopower Today’, BioSocieties 1 (2006): 195–217.
Please also consult the Handbook of the Historiography Module for further secondary readings on
Foucault.
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The Body (Howard Chiang)
Term 2, Week 1 and 2
Core reading: Larissa N. Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between
China and the West (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
Seminar / Essay Questions:
1.
In what ways do bodies matter in history? Identify two to three historiographical
trends, inter-related or not, that have characterized the study of the body.
2.
Has the historical study of the body dissolved into pure analyses of language?
3.
What is the relationship between the body and material culture?
4.
Is the body always already political?
Further reading for the seminar:
Scott, Joan W. ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17.4 (1991): 773-797.
Meyerowitz, Joanne, ‘Sex Change and the Popular Press: Historical Notes on Transsexuality in the
United States, 1930-1955,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4.2 (1998): 159- 187.
Porter, Roy, ‘History of the Body Reconsidered’, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed.
Peter Burke (Cambridge, 2001): 233-260.
Winichakul, Thongchai, ‘Maps and the Formation of the Geo-Body of Siam’, in Asian Forms of the
Nation, ed. Stein Tonnesson and Hans Antlov (London: Curzon Press, 1996), 67-91.
Background readings (for essays):
Bynum, Caroline. ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,’ Critical Inquiry
22.2 (1995): 1-33.
Csordas, Thomas J.,’Introduction: The Body as Representation and Being-in-the World,’ in T. Csordas
(ed.), Embodiment and Experience (Cambridge, 1994).
Duden, Barbara, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany
(1991), chapter 1: ‘Towards a History of the Body’.
Feher, Michel, (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vols 1-3 (New York, 1989)
Featherstone, Mike, Hepworth, Mike and Turner, Bryan S. (eds.), The Body: Social Process and
Cultural Theory (London, 1991).
Foucault, Michel, read selections from The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow: ‘The Body of the
Condemned,’ ‘Docile Bodies,’ ‘We ‘Other Victorians,’ ‘The Repressive Hypothesis’, ‘The Politics
of Health in the Eighteenth Century’ (London, 1984).
Frank, Arthur W., ‘Bringing Bodies Back in: A Decade Review,’ Theory, Culture, Society 7 (1990)
Hancock, Philip et al. (eds.), The Body, Culture and Society (Buckingham, 2000).
Hillman, David, Mazzio, Carla (eds.), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe
(New York, 1997).
Jenner, Mark. ‘Body, History, Text in Early Modern Europe,’ Social History of Medicine 12 (1999): 14354.
Ibid. and Taithe, Bertrand, ‘The Historiographical Body,’ in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds.),
Medicine in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam, 2000).
Latour, Bruno. ‘How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies’, Body
and Society (2004): 205-29.
Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard, 1990).
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Lowe, David M., The Body in Late-Capitalist USA (Durham, 1995).
Lock, Margaret. ‘“Cultivating the Body”: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and
Knowledge’, Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 133-55.
Outram, Dorinda. ‘Body and Paradox’, Isis 84 (1993): 347-52.
Park, Katharine, Nye, Robert A., Destiny is Anatomy, Review of Laqueurs Making Sex: Body and
Gender from the Greeks to Freud. The New Republic, 18, (1991): 53-57.
Porter, Roy. ‘History of the Body’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (1992),
pp. 206-32.
Price, Janet and Schildrick, Margrit (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (Edinburgh, 1999).
Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985).
Simon Schaffer, ‘Self Evidence’, Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 327-362.
Shilling, Chris, The Body and Social Theory (London, 1993).
Starobinsky, Jean, ‘The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation,’ in Michel Feher (ed.),
Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 2 (New York, 1989).
Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture
(London, 1995)
Vila, Anne. ‘The Making of the Modern Body’ [essay review], Modern Language Notes 104 (4)
(1989): 927-36.
Violence (Ben Smith)
Term 2, Weeks 3 & 4
Crime and justice are social constructs. Questions such as “who is a criminal?”, “who deserves
punishment?” and “who warrants clemency?” are not only decided by immutable laws, but also
formed by shifting relations among officials, elites, non-elites, and the media. Our answers to
these questions in turn shape social and political structures. Often elite conceptions of crime and
justice win out. In the US, conservative responses to the civil rights movement generated strict
laws against and policing of the personal consumption of certain drugs. In doing so, they
criminalised and then incarcerated poor African Americans en masse. But non-elite visions of
crime and justice can also have substantial force. In Latin America, the failure of elites to
implement a functional or agreed-upon judicial system has forced many to define their own ideas
of crime and justice, forming self-defence organizations and performing lynchings. In this week,
we move from examining Foucault’s reading of one nineteenth-century crime to discussing how
ideas of crime and justice have shaped the late twentieth century.
Core Reading:
Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A
Case of Parricide in the 19th Century
Other readings
Daniel Goldstein, “In Our Own Hands: Lynching, Justice and Law in Bolivia”, American Ethnologist,
30.1 (2003), 22-43
Daniel Goldstein, Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City
Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City
Ricardo D Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre, and Gilbert Joseph, Crime and Punishment in Latin America:
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Law and Society since Late Colonial Times
H. Hugo Frühling, Joseph S. Tulchin, Heather Golding, Crime and Violence in Latin America: Citizen
Security, Democracy, and the State
Erich Goode, Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance
Peter Eglin, Stephen Hester, A Sociology of Crime
Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in
Republican China
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
Law (James Baldwin)
Term 2, Weeks 5 & 7
Required Reading: Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a
Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Law has been central to historical studies in a number of ways. Legal texts – law-codes,
jurisprudence, court records, petitions – constitute one of the main genres of written material that
survive from many past societies. In this sense, law is a route into diverse fields including
economic, social and gender history. Law has also been an important category of analysis in its
own right, seen as the key to understanding structures of power, economic development,
property, and the family, while legal language and discourse is seen as a fundamental component
of culture. Whereas legal history might once have been seen as a particularly tedious subsection
of intellectual history, the term now covers the much broader field of “law and society.” This asks
a number of fundamental and fascinating questions about how law is embedded in broader
structures of authority (including but not limited to states), how legal professionals and laypeople
use the law and legal institutions to advance their interests, and how different legal regimes
interact in the contexts of international exchange, colonialism and migration.
Law, understood expansively as systems of normative ordering, is a field where the disciplines of
history and anthropology converge to the point of being indistinguishable. The book assigned for
this week is a remarkable example of an anthropological approach to a process of historical
change. Based on both ethnography and textual analysis, Brinkley Messick explores the
manifestations of the sharīʿa in highland Yemen, within education and the culture of writing as
well as the courtroom and the structures of political power, and traces their transformation from a
manuscript/oral to a print/bureaucratic society.
Further Reading:
Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
David Cohen, Law, Violence and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press,
1995).
John Comaroff and Simon Roberts, Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African
Context (University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Paul Dresch and Hannah Skoda, Legalism: Anthropology and History (Oxford University Press,
20
2012).
Paul Dresch and Judith Scheele, Legalism: Rules and Categories (Oxford University Press, 2015).
John Griffiths, “What is Legal Pluralism?” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 24 (1986),
1-55.
Wael Hallaq, Sharīʿa: Theory, Prac ce, Transforma ons (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Douglas Hay et al, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Pantheon,
1976).
Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks and Cross-Cultural
Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Sally Engle Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class
Americans (University of Chicago Press, 1990).
William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland
(University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Sally Falk Moore, Law and Anthropology: A Reader (Blackwell, 2005).
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Belknap Press, 2012).
Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (University of
California Press, 2003).
Fernanda Pirie and Judith Scheele, Legalism: Community and Justice (Oxford University Press,
2014)
Lawrence Rosen, The Anthropology of Justice: Law as Culture in Islamic Society (Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity and Legal Culture in Marseille,
1264-1423 (Cornell University Press, 2003)
Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century
France (Polity, 1987).
Journals:
Law and History Review
Islamic Law and Society
Online Resources: Old Bailey Online, a searchable digitized edition of the proceedings of the Old
Bailey from 1674 until 1913.
Questions:
1)
Should we see legal sources as literary or documentary texts?
2)
Is law a facet of culture?
3)
What is the connection between political power and law?
4)
Is it helpful to view Islamic law (or other laws derived from religious texts) as a
distinct type of law?
Materiality (Giorgio Riello)
Term 2, Weeks 8 and 9
Core Reading: Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (London, 1997).
Daniel Miller is a well-known anthropologist of material culture and consumption. He belongs to the
UCL ‘school of material culture anthropology’ and follows the steps of Mary Douglas, author of the
important The World of Goods (1979 - with Baron Isherwood). The discipline of anthropology, with
its focus on the everyday, has influenced the ways in which historians approach material culture
and objects in their studies. This week we will consider Miller’s best known book Material Culture
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and Mass Consumption in which he provides a template for the study of material culture, artefacts
and consumption.
Seminar/ Essay Questions:
1. What is the relationship between material culture and consumption?
2. How has the meaning of materiality been interpreted by Hegel, Marx etc. and what does
objectification mean?
3. Has the relationship between objects and people changed over time?
4. In what ways does material culture help historians? And what are its limitations?
Further Readings
Adamson, Glenn, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007): 69-78
Berg, Maxine, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth
Century’, Past and Present, 182 (2004): 85-142.
Burke, Peter, Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence (London, 2001), pp. 9-19.
Clunas, Craig, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge,
1991).
Dannehl, Karin, ‘Object biographies: From production to consumption’, in Karen Harvey (ed.),
History and Material Culture: a student’s guide to approaching alternative sources (Abingdon:
Routeldge, 2009), pp. 123-138
Dikotter, Frank, Exotic commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York, 2007).
Grassby, ‘Material Culture and Cultural History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 35/4 (2005), pp.
591-603.
Hamling, Tara and Richardson, Catherine, ‘Introduction’, in Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson
(eds.), Everyday Objects (Aldershot, 2010), pp. 1-13 Harvey, Karen, ‘Introduction: History and
Material Culture’, in Karen Harvey (ed.), History and Material Culture (London, 2009), pp. 24-47.
Auslander, Leora, ‘Beyond Words’, American Historical Review, 110/4 (2006), pp. 1015-1044.
Hurcombe, Linda M, ‘Materiality’ , in Archaeological Artefacts as Material Culture (Abingdon,
2007), pp. 109-118
Johnson, Matthew H., Housing Culture: Traditional Architecture in an English Landscape (London,
1993): vi-xi Prown, Jules David, ‘Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and
Method’, Winterthur Portfolio 17 (Spring 1982): 1-19
Prown, Jules David, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven and London,
2001).
Riello, Giorgio, ‘Things that Shape History: material culture and historical narrative, in Karen Harvey
(ed.), History and Material Culture: a student’s guide to approaching alternative sources (Abingdon,
2009), pp. 24-46.
Styles, John, ‘Product Innovation in Early Modern London’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), pp. 124169.
Styles, John and Vickery, Amanda, ‘Introduction’, in John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds.), Gender, Taste
and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (Studies in British Art 17) (New Haven,
2006), pp. 1-34 (pp. 1-2, 14-22) Tarlow, Sarah, ‘Emotion in Archaeology’, Current Anthropology, 41:5
(2000), pp. 713-730
Turkle, Sherry, ‘Introduction: the things that matter’, in Sherry Turkle (ed), Evocative
Objects: Things We Think with (Cambridge, 2007, pp. 3-12 (pp. 3-8).
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